5/07/2009 @ 6:00PM

The Best Buy And Sell Calls

The S&P 500 returned -38% over the three years ended March 31, 2009. If you had followed the advice on the best picks of our top-ranked analysts in the following presentation, you’d have fared much better that the overall market.

As part of its research for the Blue-Chip Analyst Awards, Zacks Investment Research identified analysts who made exceptionally good calls–either bullish or bearish–over the last three years.

For this exercise, in order to avoid one-hit wonders, we limited our universe to those individuals Zacks cited as the top five analysts in their industry group for their three-year stock picking and earnings forecasting ability.

We tracked each analyst’s recommendations from the time the analyst went bullish or bearish until the time the analyst switched positions, or though the end of our monitoring period, March 31, 2009. We ranked these individuals according to their excess return–how much better they did relative to their respective industry benchmarks.

We were able to reach most of our five leading bulls and five leading bears and get their thoughts behind their original picks as well as one or more stock recommendations for the year ahead.